Mozilla CEO Speaks Out on Future of Firefox

“According to Mozilla’s CEO Mitchell Baker, Firefox is just at the beginning of its life cycle. In this one-on-one interview with APCMag.com, she talks about where Firefox came from and where it’s going.”

Don’t know about SMS but you can use Group Policies in Active Directory to push it out to any machines on the domain. You just need to get hold of an MSI versino of Firefox. I use the onws from https://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox which are usually fiarly up to date, Thunderbird MSIs are a different matter, I haven’t seen a Thunderbird 2 MSI yet.

The modern browser is like the operating system for the computer that is the internet. So the real power and respect and reward should go to the people who create the standards of the system, and to the developers who build the browsers that adhere to those standards.

Reading about the business folks coming in and selling search tie-ins and advertisements and branding opportunities… it makes me go a bit “ugh”.

The browser has a lot of power to make money from steering people. For Mozilla’s sake I hope they remember why people switched to Firefox in the first place. (it worked and wasn’t full of shit)

Based on TFA, it seems that Mozilla gets so much money from Google and alternative default search providers that they see no reason to shoehorn (more) crapware into Firefox. I think they’re thrilled that they were able to drive so much revenue ($55M/year!!) from a feature that even the most sensitive users find convenient and unobtrusive.

They’ll get more dollars out of offline web apps and mobile platforms. There’s no reason to ruin a good thing with their traditional PC web browser when that’s their meal ticket into the markets that will make them tons of money going forward.

I wonder how much of that money from Google is for the hits generated by default page/search engine options, and how much is just to support a product that undermines Microsoft’s online business efforts.

That said, I’m sure Google does get a lot of hits from Firefox, but it would be my default search engine anyway. Hard to know the exact monetary value. From figures in the article ($55m, not just from Google and 75~100m users), I guess Google are paying in the order of 50 cents per user per year. Are they getting that much back?

One of the bigger features of FF3 will be an offline ajax support. Once popular apps like gmail start taking advantage of features like this, we have a fully web enabled platform. The last part of her interview pretty much sums it up:

The most spectacular thing I liked is that open source application making good money.

$55 Million.

In Mitchell’s words

“Mitchell Baker: Yep it’s I think unprecedented for an open source project like us.”

Hope this encourages numerous other good open source applications like open office, KDE, GIMP etc who are doing good work silently. I just wish that they also become self sufficient and profitable and not depend on community donations.

Connecting an audience to content is extremely lucrative. All other operations on content are essentially worthless. KDE might drive revenue by collecting what would amount to bribes to include a particular app on their desktop by default (connecting users with content), but that doesn’t seem like something they’d do. Desktop software generally doesn’t have the potential to affect the popularity of content.

Today is one of the many days where I’ve gone down the list of ways to monetize free software, and I’m not going to do it again. I didn’t put this particular business model on the list because it won’t work for the vast majority of desktop-oriented free software projects. If you’re a web service, your options are comparatively limitless, but the only attention-herding application on the desktop is the browser, and I would highly suggest not entering this market.

Mitchell Baker: “Well a couple of things to note here; it’s not just Google — they’re not the only ones. One of the things that we pioneered – I mean people do think of Google because they are the default and the search box and the start page, but one of the things that we pioneered was multiple choices for the user.”

Honestly, even as a firefox user, I find this hard to believe. I’ve tried each new version of Opera that comes out, and I can remember Opera having multiple choices in it’s search drop down since version 5 (circa 2000). But hey, whatever floats her boat.

There’s a touch of that “Firefox is the best because it just is” attitude here. You also see it the discussion of Gecko vs. KHTML. Gecko is obviously heavier on the resources and more intimidating for prospective developers because it is more powerful than KHTML. Not being an expert, I’ll take her word on Gecko offering more functionality, although I know that KHTML supports more of the W3C standards. But as a software engineer, I know all too well that code size and complexity doesn’t correlate well with feature set.

She leans on the “product” concept as a crutch. A browser is a relatively simple container for a set of rendering pipelines. The difficult part is the rendering. Firefox has much of its plugin architecture tied into Gecko, so that’s their rendering technology from here on out. She couldn’t have answered that KHTML is really neat, and maybe Firefox will explore that possibility in the future. That option isn’t really on the table. If Gecko isn’t sliced bread by itself, then it must be part of a product that is fire and the wheel put together. That’s just a marketing tactic.

I like Firefox. I just wish it acted less like a product. Same with OpenOffice. There I go again, same broken record.

Leaning on Firefox as a product is a benefit in my eyes. From the user’s perspective it is a browser and should stay slim and improve. From a business perspective Mozilla needs to keep extending their financial base to keep development going. Concentrating on just the browser would not address their business needs. As long as they keep the browser clean and innovation keeps occurring I don’t see how a product model would hurt them. Mozilla.org is really mozilla.com now a for profit company releasing an open source product. I mostly use Seamonkey since the Gecko engine is the same and Seamonkey saves me on memory instead of running Thunderbird/Firefox combo. The only feature I really miss in Firefox is the ease of installing/removing extensions. As long as the improvements keep trickling down to the Seamonkey project I am happy.

Parts of that article reminded me what was exciting about the Web back when Netscape was the Holy Grail. Was recently talking to an AOL employee who started out at Netscape and saw the “progression” of Netscape at AOL. What a sad period.